Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Tag Archives: Libertarian

In Jane Mayer’s expose of Charles Koch, the billionaire conservative running Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas, she made it sound as if she were shedding the light on Koch’s political activities for the very first time. Titled “Covert Operations,” Mayer noted that the growth of Koch Industries since Charles and his brother David took over its operations after the death of their father, Fred Koch, in 1967, has made each of them multi-billionaires—somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 billion each. Koch Industries operates oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, 4,000 miles of pipeline, along with Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpets, the spandex product Lycra and generates an estimated $100 billion a year in revenues.

But the real lowdown, according to Mayer, is how they are investing their wealth:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.

And they are doing it with a flourish. Mayer quotes Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity—calling it a “non-partisan watchdog group” which in fact is funded by internationalist socialist George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, among others, to “reveal abuses of power, corruption and dereliction of duty by powerful public and private institutions…”—as saying:

The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart…

Charles Koch’s efforts are based on both the short-run—determined to keep President Obama a one-term president and turn control of the Senate back to the Republicans, as well as the long-run—by

Before he was nationally known, Rep. Ryan visited me at ABC, and we went to lunch. He was terrific. He was a rare politician, one who actually cared about America’s coming debt crisis and the unfairness of entitlements. He even talked about F.A. Hayek‘s “The Road to Serfdom“! If only more politicians thought that way.

But then the housing bubble burst. Ryan voted for TARP. Then he voted for the auto bailout. Who is this guy? I thought he believed in markets!

John Stossel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s easy for me to throw grenades, especially because my voice is so small and my opinion often discounted. And Stossel is one of my favorite libertarians. In fact I often question why Fox allows him on the network at all, given their statist mindset.

But Stossel has done the libertarian movement a disservice here, I think. He expresses admiration for Paul Ryan as an economic conservative: “He [Ryan] even talked about F.A. Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’”!

But it didn’t take. I read it in the sixth grade, and it took. Especially the chapter “Why the Worst Get On Top.” And I am in distinguished company. Gerald O’Driscoll of the Cato Institute wrote this:

In perhaps the best chapter of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek details “Why the Worst Get on Top” in totalitarian societies. The chapter begins with a quotation from Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Hayek then elaborates the Actonian insight.

From that chapter which has informed my outlook on government and politicians ever since I have nothing but contempt for those who try to “fix things,” and interfere with our lives as a result. Many of them are, in the words of Mr. Welch—the founder of the John Birch Society—just “useful idiots” in the employ of darker forces bent on establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. I put Paul Ryan into that camp.

And now, unfortunately, so do I put John Stossel.

Ryan voted for TARP and the auto company bailouts and now regrets it. Stossel thinks that’s OK: Ryan has changed his mind: “I wish he had voted against those bills, but the political class was in near panic, and Ryan is a politician.”

That’s little comfort to me. Paul Ryan is an enemy of freedom. And any enemy of freedom is an enemy of mine. To have Stossel coddle Ryan and say, well, he meant well, all is forgiven, is treacherous.

The era of bipartisan big government may have come to an end. Largely thanks to Rep. Paul Ryan and the fiscal blueprint he prepared as chairman of the House Budget Committee earlier this year, the GOP has begun climbing back on the wagon of fiscal sobriety and has shown at least some willingness to restrain the growth of government.

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Some willingness?” This frankly is about the best anyone can say about Ryan’s plan, the Path to Prosperity. My biggest problem is that nowhere does anyone, including Mitchell (who calls himself, unabashedly, “a top expert on tax reform and supply-side tax policy at the Cato Institute”), refer, at least once, to the Constitutional limitations on government. It’s as if that is now an irrelevant consideration, not even worth talking about.

Put another way, without Constitutional restraints, we’re left foundering in the sea, trying to make do the best we can with what we have: no fixed stars, no guidance, no direction, no signposts. Just bumbling along the best we can.

Here’s what I mean:

The most important headline about the Ryan budget is that it limits the growth rate of federal spending, with outlays increasing by an average of 3.1% annually over the next 10 years. …limiting spending so it grows by 3.1% per year, as Mr. Ryan proposes, quickly leads to less red ink. This is because federal tax revenues are projected by the House Budget Committee to increase 6.6% annually over the next 10 years if the House budget is approved (and this assumes the Bush tax cuts are made permanent).

Ah, that’s the goal: less red ink. Slow down the bus a little bit. But what’s the goal, the end point? How will we know we’ve succeeded? Is actual shrinkage of government even mentioned? Of course not. Mitchell seems to think that the purpose of the economy is to generate revenues for the government!

Even Mitchell admits it:

No, it doesn’t bring the federal government back down to 3 percent of GDP, so it’s not libertarian Nirvana.

But we manage to stay out of fiscal hell, so that counts for something.

Sweet fancy Moses! What’s next? Will conservatives come out in favor of bears doing their bathroom business in the woods without government oversight? Will the market fundamentalists soon argue that children eat candy for the sweet, sweet taste? Is there no end to their ideological madness?

Jonah Goldberg (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

What a great way to start the day! Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review, thinks the resistance to renewing authorization for the “corporatist carbuncle”—as he calls the Export-Import bank—is a very good thing. And so do I.

Usually that authorization is rubber-stamped by Democrats and Republicans alike—another example of how different they aren’t—as evidenced by their willingness to use our money to fund the bank two dozen times since its birth under FDR in 1934, with nary a dissenting voice.

But not this time. According to the AP it took months of negotiations and pleas and bargainings and, no doubt, some backroom deals, to get the recalcitrant objectors into line and obtain the authorization finally rendered.

And who are these “recalcitrant” throwbacks? Why free market supporters, that’s who! As Goldberg said, “Conservatives—and especially libertarians but also some leftists—have been building the case against corporatism for a very long time.”

Partly it’s Obama’s fault, says Goldberg:

President Obama is easily the most corporatist president since FDR. He bought a couple of car companies. His health-care law turns insurance companies into utilities. He increasingly speaks the language of economic nationalism used by the two Roosevelts.

But it also has to do with what Goldberg calls a “growing philosophical consistency on the right.” Where did that come from?

I like to think that the so-obvious attempts by Obama to impose his socialist mandates onto the American people are causing many of them to reconsider exactly what kind of government they want. And that’s a good thing.

I have been hard-pressed to find any good thing to say about Obama and his attempts to impose Alinsky-ite authoritarian rule onto the country. But I have found one: he is galvanizing opposition like no president before him.

With the help of 14 writers and seven contributors and researchers, Glenn Beck has burst forth with another book that expresses his unique style: fulminating, ranting, exploding, rollicking, sardonic, eclectic, and intemperate. Beck and friends have written 11 best sellers and seven of them have reached the #1 position on the New York Times best seller list.Cowards will no doubt be number eight.

There is much valuable information contained here, some of which is surprising even to those who consider themselves well-read. For instance, who is Madison Grant? You’ll find out starting on page eight. There is no index to his book, so you’ll have to find out the hard way, by reading it. Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, which exposed the Progressive movement’s fascination with eugenics, or ethnic cleansing. What’s more important is learning how many of the Progressive Era’s leading lights favored Grant’s position that “the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit” and “human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

The reader will be exasperated at Beck’s setting up of a straw man in his caricature of Ron Paul’s foreign policy position, and then destroying it, not with reason and logic, but with

Following the announcement last Thursday by Senator Rand Paul that he was endorsing former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the Republican Party’s nominee for President, he took time to respond to critics of that decision in an interview with Peter Schiff. Said Rand: “Supporting the [Republican] nominee has been part of my [effort] to have influence…. If Republicans see that you are not going to support the nominee, then doors close.”

Rand’s strategy is much more political than ideological. He feels that he can do business with and make binding agreements with parties with whom he has major disagreements but those agreements can only be made if he is allowed “inside.”

Last week, conservative political commentator and the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008 Wayne Allyn Rootreiterated his prediction from last December: Republican front-runner Mitt Romney will beat incumbent Barack Obama in a landslide in November.

Before hosting his own radio show, W.A.R: The Wayne Allyn Root Show in New York City, Root was a professional sports handicapper in Las Vegas. Root says he is “a well-known Vegas odds maker with one of the most accurate records of predicting political races.” But neither Romney nor Obama is his favorite. Said Root:

Neither Obama nor Romney are my horses in this race. I believe both Republicans and Democrats have destroyed the U.S. economy and [have] brought us to the edge of economic disaster….

But as an odds maker with a pretty remarkable record of picking political races, I play no favorites. I simply use common sense to call them as I see them.

Root predicted back in December that Romney, behind in most polls at the time, would win the Republican nomination in Tampa in August. He also predicted then that Romney would beat Obama in November and has found no good reason since then to change his mind: “Today I am even more convinced of

A coalition of Tea Party groups has decided that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is making it too difficult for start-up Tea Party groups to qualify for tax exempt status and so is creating one to fight back. The group is complaining about IRS requests for thousands of pages of documentation required to obtain or to keep their exempt status under Section 501(c)4 of the Internal Revenue Code. Eric Wilson, director of Kentucky’s 9/12 Project accused the IRS of “targeting local Tea Party, liberty groups and ordinary citizens” with an 88-question IRS questionnaire and demands that it be completed and returned within two weeks.

Said Wilson:

They’re trying to bury us in time, trying to bury us in paperwork, and they are making us use up resources we don’t have, especially small local organizations and small groups. And they’re doing this during a critical election year. This is not by accident. This is coordinated and this is targeted.

Toby Walker, president of the Waco, Texas, Tea Party, said the IRS demanded every Facebook, Twitter and social media post that was sent out by her group over the last two-and-a-half years, along with transcripts of every one of the group’s radio shows. The requests for such detailed and extension information is overwhelming the small staffs of many of the groups which often have fewer than 50 members and a very small part-time staff.

The benefits of obtaining tax exempt status for these groups apparently outweighed potential concerns that the IRS would grow fangs and seek blood. Under the applicable code, 501(c)4 groups may engage in political activity and enjoy tax exemptions on purchases and other activities, but contributions from donors are not tax deductible nor are lists of donors required to be made public. But such exemption requires following the IRS’ rules which, as these organizations are now learning, are changeable. Returns must be filed in a timely fashion even though no tax is due, and failure to file on a timely basis opens the groups up to the possibility of

The death of William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, on October 26, 2011, should have been noted and his life’s work honored quietly by his friends and Cato supporters, including especially the Koch brothers, Charles and David. Instead, his death set in motion events that are likely to affect the Cato Institute, and the libertarian movement itself, significantly.

Originally known as “The Charles Koch Foundation, Inc.” the Cato Institute was founded as a Kansas non-profit corporation in December, 1974, with the initial funding from Charles Koch of Koch Industries, Inc. In 1977 the shareholders signed an agreement that, upon the death of a shareholder, his interest would first be offered to Cato to purchase or, if Cato refused to buy it, then it would be offered to the other shareholders. In 1985 the shareholder agreement was revised and signed by the four shareholders who included Charles Koch, Cato president Ed Crane, George Pearson, and Niskanen. In 1991 David Koch purchased an equal interest. In 2008 Pearson sold his shares back to Cato, leaving the remaining four: Koch brothers Charles and David, Ed Crane, and Niskanen, each with equal shares and equal interests in Cato.

When Niskanen died the Koch brothers expected that his widow would “tender” his shares either to Cato or to them, which would make them controlling shareholders in Cato. A board meeting scheduled for December 1st was postponed to March 1st to discuss and resolve the matter privately and that would have been the end of the matter. But when the shares weren’t offered,

In a note to his readers on February 15th Roger Stoneannounced his resignation from the Republican Party, changing his voter registration to the Libertarian Party. A self-proclaimed “GOP hit-man,” Stone became involved in politics in his teens, working for President Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972 (known as the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP), serving as the National Director of Youth for Reagan in 1976 and then as the Young Republican National Chairman from 1977 to 1979. He worked for the Reagan presidential campaign in 1980 and in 1984 and then for Jack Kemp’s campaign for president in 1988.

In so doing Stone left behind a legacy of political dirty tricks and outrageous shenanigans that in some cases altered American political history. He was born with the ability to observe a situation and then see how to take advantage of it. In the first grade his first political trick was to support John F. Kennedy in his campaign against Nixon in 1960. He brags: “I remember going through the cafeteria line and telling every kid that Nixon was in favor of school on Saturdays. It was my first political trick.” When he ran for election as president of his high school senior class he said he “built alliances and put all my serious challengers on my ticket. Then I recruited the most unpopular guy in the school to run against me. You think that’s mean? No, it’s smart!”

He saw an opportunity for another trick during Nixon’s campaign in 1972. He adopted the name Jason Rainer and made contributions in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to Pete McCloskey’s campaign (McCloskey was Nixon’s challenger in the primary). He then sent the receipt to the Manchester Union Leader to “prove” that McCloskey was in fact a left-wing stooge.

Later on Stone hired a GOP staffer, gave him the pseudonym Sedan Chair II, who wound up serving as George McGovern’s chauffeur creating in information pipeline directly to the Nixon campaign.

Perhaps the most outrageous, and historically important, of Stone’s tricks, known as the “Brooks Brothers riot,” took place in Miami-Dade County, Florida on November 21st, 2000, during the recount of ballots in the Presidential election. The Florida Supreme Court had just ruled in favor of Al Gore to allow a recount but it had to be completed by November 26th. Stone saw his opportunity to delay the recount until after the 26th by bringing in

UPDATE 1/17/2012: Correspondence with Daniel Gordon

It was my privilege to write this article about your efforts which appeared yesterday at The New American. I hope you find it a fair treatment.

May I call you in a day or so to do a follow-up on your resolution?

Respectfully,

Bob Adelmann

Dear Mr. Adelmann,

The article you penned on the topic was nothing short of outstanding, and I am proud to have had my efforts published by you and your excellent publication. Please do feel free to call for a follow up. There has been some very exciting developments over the past couple of days. The number in my signature is my cell and you are free to use it. Thank you.

That section of the act, signed into law by President Obama on New Year’s Eve:

provides for the indefinite detention of American citizens by the military on American soil, without charge, and without right to legal counsel and [the] right to trial.

Given the fact that the constitutions of Rhode Island and that of the United States are replete with guarantees of individual liberties, right to habeas corpus, and right to freedom of speech, the offending sections of that law are repugnant to the sensibilities of anyone [who] has a basic understanding of the foundation of this country….

When I took the oath of office, I swore that I would support the constitutions of Rhode Island and the United States. And before one constituent of mine is snatched up in the dead of night, without due process under our laws, they’ll have to pry those documents from my cold dead hands.

Gordon has a lot of company in his opposition to the NDAA. Pastor Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party’s candidate for President in 2008, wrote: “Americans should realize that, coupled with the Patriot Act, the NDAA, for all intents and purposes, completely nullifies a good portion of the Bill of Rights, turns the United States into a war zone, and places US citizens under

The exit polls following the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaryshowed something remarkable that somehow missed the evening news: Paul consistently won the votes of the young, the disaffected, the independent, as well as discouraged Democrats. CNN’s exit polls in New Hampshire showed Paul winning almost half the voters aged 18-29 (compared to Romney’s 26 percent), and splitting the vote with Romney in the 30-to-39 age bracket. Paul also won 35 percent of unmarried voters, 40 percent of those who had never voted in a primary before, one-third of the independent vote, and nearly half of those with no religious affiliation. He also took a third of those who characterized themselves as “somewhat liberal” in their outlook.

These results were startlingly similar to the results of exit polls taken following the Iowa caucuses: Paul won the majority of voters under age 40. By age bracket, Paul won 50 percent of caucus-goers aged 17-24, 45 percent of those between age 25 and 29, and a third of those in the 30-to-39 age bracket.

Paul’s press secretary, Gary Howard, tried to explain this phenomenon: “Congressman Paul has a strong and consistent message that resonates with a wide range of people, but young people in particular appreciate his honesty and his character. They realize the mess that the establishment status quo politicians have put us in, and recognize that

Writing for the left-wing blog ThinkProgress, Matthew Yglesias noted his difficulty in coming up with a suitable slogan representing what the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators really wanted. He explained:

My view is that the best demand of all…is “free money for the rest of us.” There are a lot of different specific ways this can be implemented, but the…Powers That Be…have been willing to provide all manner of free money to players in the banking system. Debt cancellation is a form of free money for the indebted. But why give free money only to banks? And why give free money only to the indebted? Why not free money for everyone? “Everyone,” of course, includes the indebted. But it also includes ordinary people who didn’t happen to avail themselves of the credit binge. It’s an idea so good that it sounds almost silly.

As political commentator for the Concerned Women for American’s Legislative Action Committee and former speechwriter for former President George H. W. Bush, Janice Shaw Crouse celebrated Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday with a paean of praise for the former President‘s skills as “The Great Communicator” which perfectly illustrates the perception of Reagan as a good conservative, at least when he spoke.

The first time Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) offered his “Roadmap for America’s Future” to the House of Representatives, it failed by 137-293, with 38 Republicans voting against, including Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). With his own district safe in the fall elections, Ryan has been spending his time generating support for Roadmap II with presentations to conservative think tanks and coffee klatches.

And he seems to be gaining some traction along with a lot of fresh attention.

Moviegoers worldwide have enthusiastically rewarded Robin Hood since its opening in May with gross ticket sales of more than a quarter of a billion dollars, and the film is well in the black for Universal Pictures and its producer Ridley Scott. Predictably, liberal reviewers have taken significant verbal umbrage at the underlying theme of the film: lower taxes and less government.

“This is abuse…. It’s [another] case of eminent domain abuse,” said Renee Smith-Ward, owner of Wag’In Tail, a dog-grooming salon in Auburn, New York. As reported by Fox News, the city is threatening to use “eminent domain” to seize her salon and other private property nearby to allow a builder to construct a hotel conference center.

Smith-Ward said, “I don’t believe it’s right to take someone’s property away from them for a hotel, for a private developer.” She said she thought eminent domain was “for power lines, roads, schools, hospitals [but] not for a private developer.” Another property owner, Michael Kazanivsky agreed: “These people just want to come in and steal it from you. They’re trying to take it from me. It’s not right.”